One of Princeton’s retail food service workers, employed at the University since 1997, said divine intervention led him to his current position at Frist Campus Center.
“Years ago, to tell you the truth, I went to church on a Sunday, and there was a job application there, and I just had stopped working at a prison because they had privatized,” explained the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They prayed over the application there for me.”
The prayers worked, he said. “True story: I brought it in Monday, got a call Tuesday, got interviewed Wednesday, and Thursday I was here working, so I got here through God. That’s how I got here.”
But for most employees, the hiring process is less straightforward. To hire workers — both faculty and staff — administrators must not only assess the qualifications of applicants but also comply with a number of state and federal laws, as well as union contracts that govern the process through which the University chooses new employees.
Filling the spots
One can think of the University “as being analogous to a small town [complete] with a police force; a building infrastructure that has to be built and maintained; restaurants and other small commerce-based entities; a residential population; individual research groups … and finally offices and departments that govern the town and provide support services for operations,” University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said in an e-mail.
The Office of Human Resources (HR) oversees the hiring of non-faculty workers who are employed in jobs ranging from administrative positions to Dining Services. But individual offices perform interviews and make the actual hiring decisions. HR administrators directed requests for comment to Cliatt for this story.
The University has established salary ranges for specific positions. Within these ranges there are pay scales that can change based on a worker’s job description, experience and market rate. All permanent employees receive at least $14 per hour, the rate that the University established as its minimum wage for these employees in 2008.
But these pay ranges only govern non-union employees. For dealing with any of the six unions that represent 20 to 25 percent of University employees, guidelines regarding hiring and pay scale are dictated by union agreements.
Union salary ranges, as specified in the contracts, vary based on job responsibilities and individuals’ work experience. Contracts typically indicate a minimum, midpoint and maximum wage for positions. Salaries for union employees may be different from those of non-union employees, since union members’ pay is determined according to contracts negotiated with the University roughly every four years.
These contracts are “largely silent on the topic of hiring,” Cliatt noted. “They generally provide a framework for notification to the unions when positions are available.” Union policies also provide “preference for longer service employees (a seniority rule) when all other qualifications are equal,” she added.
When looking for short-term workers with specialized skills, the University may turn to other avenues outside of posting job listings.
In such cases, the University may turn to unions or “hiring halls,” Cliatt explained.
Hiring halls respond to University requests for workers by pulling from within their ranks.
“In these cases, it’s common in the industry for these categories of staff to be employed through a hiring hall that knows their expertise and assigns them to jobs requiring their specific skills,” she said.
These workers are often used to “rehab” existing structures on campus or assist construction firms in major projects, Cliatt said. “The nature of many of the jobs, such as construction, is that they are short-term. Therefore, these individuals often are not long-term employees of any one company, because their expertise is specific to a short-term project.”
Finding faculty
The hiring of faculty and other academic professionals is completely distinct from the process governing staff hiring. It is instead a collaborative effort between the Office of the Dean of the Faculty and individual academic departments, Cliatt said.
There are no set rules for faculty pay scales, Cliatt said.
“Salaries are determined by departments depending on the qualifications of the applicant, the needs of the department and the competitive marketplace,” she explained.
Full professors at the University earn an average of $172,000 per year, according to the 2007-08 annual report of the American Association of University Professors. The average Princeton full professor makes roughly $12,000 less than one at Harvard, but roughly $7,000 more than one at Yale.
“For faculty arriving with tenure, the Faculty Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements must approve the candidate,” Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said. “In this process, a dossier is constructed involving a collection of leaders from the leaders in the field evaluating the candidate’s work.”
Mixing it up
It is not only an individual’s record that is investigated early in the hiring process. In filling job vacancies for both staff and faculty, the University makes having a diverse applicant pool a priority, Terri Harris Reed, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, said.
Federal law stipulates that the University consider set “protected categories” of diversity in hiring, Reed explained, including race, ethnicity, gender, national origin and veteran status. Of these categories, race and gender are the most apparent and thus most addressed as HR and individual departments extend interviews to prospective employees. The University also devotes attention to diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity, though not in the hiring process.
“The goal is to have people think and be mindful of the various stages in the [hiring] process where they might be able to open up to people who have not been traditionally represented in the [applicant] pool,” Reed explained.
Job advertisements are placed in publications and job fairs with the specific goal of attracting a wide diversity of applicants, as part of what Reed termed the University’s “affirmative action in outreach.”
“At the heart of our equity efforts,” Cliatt explained, “is an affirmative outreach process that is based on the understanding that a hiring process that achieves diversity in the hiring pool increases the likelihood that qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds will be hired.”
Hiring managers also ensure that applications are received from a diverse group by making sure requirements for advertised jobs “only focused on those elements of the description that are required rather than preferred,” Reed noted.
For instance, people of color are statistically less likely to have doctorates, Reed said, so it is important to be certain that having a Ph.D. is necessary to fulfill a job’s responsibilities before listing it as a job requirement to avoid unnecessarily limiting the applicant pool.
Once the application pool for a position is established, the actual hiring decision is made without consideration of factors like race or gender, Cliatt said.
“The actual hiring decision cannot be based on a protected group,” she said.
Casual workers
Many of these policies regarding diversity, pay scale and hiring do not apply to all workers employed by the University.
Permanent workers, regardless of union membership or job title, are eligible for employee benefits like insurance and retirement plans. But on occasion, departments and offices have a need for temporary, or so-called “casual workers,” to perform specific, short-term projects.
Casuals are hired by individual departments on a “case-specific basis” for a period of up to five months, Cliatt explained. They are hired for jobs like “translating a text, completing a single lab experiment, working Reunions, developing a database [or] installing a piece of equipment,” she said. These tasks could be completed in a matter of hours or require similar hours to those of a full-time employee.
The Program in Visual Arts, for example, hires several models for its art classes on a casual basis, Lewis Center communications director Marguerite d’Aprile-Smith said in an e-mail.
“Each faculty [member] teaching drawing and painting [is] allowed up to four models per semester, but not all classes use them,” she explained. “We generally hire three or four models per semester on a trial basis.”
Any Princeton employee working more than 1,000 hours in an anniversary year must be eligible for a University pension plan, according to New Jersey law. This regulation extends to casual workers, but these individuals rarely meet the standards required for qualification for the retirement plan.
Casual workers are also not eligible benefits, and their salaries are not governed by HR guidelines. Casual workers instead are subject to the policies of individual departments and offices. Thus there is a great diversity of working conditions and pay.
But casuals may fall under the terms of union contracts, Cliatt noted. The Princeton University Library Assistants’ contract, for example, stipulates that casual employees be paid three percent less than library employees, and other unions dictate other terms.
To address issues related to casual employees and establish guidelines and practices, the University created a Casuals Task Force in early 2007.
“The task force reviewed the various ways in which casuals are selected, recruited and hired with the goal of establishing best practices,” Cliatt said, adding, “Final recommendations are pending.”
Staff writer Jonathan Evans contributed reporting.
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